Conscientious Objectors in World War I Britain

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Let’s wriggle into a small, dusty corner of British history and see what someone left behind. In other words, let’s talk about Britain’s (as far as I can establish) first conscientious objectors: the men who refused to serve in the military during World War I. 

But–as usual–we have to take a step back before we go forward. To have conscientious objectors, a country needs a draft–a system of conscription that forces all physically fit men between certain ages into the armed forces. Without that, there’s nothing to object to, conscientiously or otherwise. 

From the information I’ve found, World War I marked the first time Britain introduced universal conscription. The fighting was on an unprecedented scale and it called for an unprecedented number of fighters.  

The war started out with brass bands and a tide of patriotism, working the country into the kind of fever you need to recruit soldiers. Men and boys signed up, and at some point some number of women–it was probably a small number but they’ve been written into history in bold-face type–began handing white feathers to men who looked able-bodied enough to be soldiers but who visibly weren’t to publicly shame them.

Irrelevant photo: campion and stitchwort growing by the roadside

But the number of volunteers wasn’t high enough. The war was turning soldiers into dead bodies on a massive scale: 6% of the adult male population died in the war–12% of serving soldiers. They had to be replaced, so the country introduced a draft.

 

The conscientious objector category

It’s against that background that we take our snapshot of Britain’s conscientious objectors–or COs, since (a) they were often called that and (b) my fingers are convinced conscientious is spelled some other way.  

From the time conscription was introduced (1916, two years after the war started, first for those who care, first for single men between 18 and 40, then for all men, married or otherwise) until the end of the war, 20,000 men applied for CO status, and that tells us two things. The most obvious is that it wasn’t a massive number of people but it wasn’t an insignificant one either, but the more interesting and less obvious thing is that a category had been created. If you either naturally or with some contortion could fit yourself into it, a recognized way had been made for you to refuse military service.

The Military Service Act–the same one that introduced conscription–set up tribunals where men could argue that they shouldn’t be drafted on the grounds of hardship, illness, education, essential work, or–pay attention here, because this is the point–a conscientious objection to military service, which could be religious or more generally moral.

The tribunals included someone from the military along with local men–and we can count on the local members being drawn from the area’s, ahem, important people, because class comes into everything in Britain. And elsewhere, but oh-so-visibly here. So if you showed up to argue that you shouldn’t be drafted, they were the ones who’d decide whether you had a legitimate reason or were just a coward–you know, the kind of lowlife who objected couldn’t see the patriotic joy in climbing out of a trench and running through a hailstorm of bullets. 

Some people’s objection to the war was political, and the act allowed no space for that. You could have a moral or religious objection or you could pick up your damn rifle and go fight.

The panels’ questioning was (no surprise here) often hostile. One CO described his hearing this way:

“They put me through the usual sorts of questions that these tribunals did. They had certain routine questions. A favourite one was, what would you do if your sister was threatened with rape by some German soldier or something like that? And I can’t quite remember what I answered but it was to the effect that that had nothing to do with being a CO against the war. I think that I said that I didn’t know what I would do and that it didn’t matter in the present context in the least what I would do. The thing was this was a protest against the war, that the war was wrong.”

If your argument was accepted, you were shunted off into the Non-Combatant Corps, and my fingers don’t object to the spelling there but it was called the NCC anyway. Let’s save a few of the keystrokes I’ve wasted explaining that and use the acronym. It was created by the same act that established the draft.

If it wasn’t accepted–and most weren’t–you were drafted and had to decide whether to serve or to refuse, leading to tales such as that of a rifleman who refused to load his rifle for target practice and another one who refused to put on his uniform.

 

The NCC

If your argument was accepted and you were shunted into the NCC, you  were expected to accept military discipline. You were also expected to accept acronyms. I can’t tell you any tales about what that was like in Britain, but I met an American World War I CO (he was the brother of an uncle-by-marriage–that’s how old I am) and he was sent to an army camp in the Midwest somewhere. Let’s randomly say Kansas. When he got there, conscientious objectors were rare enough they weren’t sure whether to lock him up (he might be a conscientious objector) or salute him (he might be a commissioned officer). His paperwork didn’t make it clear.

After a few days, unfortunately, they figured it out and the quality of his food went down sharply.

I had to slip that in. I never have found a spot for it before.

In the NCC, you might end up building, cleaning, loading or unloading anything that wasn’t munitions, and you might do it in Britain or where the fighting was. You might carry stretchers–a job that was as dangerous as being in the infantry–or work in the medical tents. You were subject to military discipline.

 

The refuseniks

On the other hand, you might join the hard-core COs and refuse to follow the NCC’s military discipline, in which case you’d be court martialed and end up in prison. 

As an alternative to prison, you could join the Home Office Scheme, which offered imprisoned COs the choice of doing “work of national importance under civil control”–building roads and reservoirs, say. You’d live in a camp, and if you weren’t in the military your life still wasn’t your own. In some camps, you’d be treated decently and in others badly. In one camp, the COs went on strike.

Or you could join the handful of COs who took an absolutist stance. For them, working on a road or a reservoir benefitted the government in wartime and was an acknowledgement that the government had a right to dictate to them. They were court martialed, sometimes repeatedly. Some went on hunger strikes and were force fed. Many were underfed. Seventy-three died of poor treatment either in prison or shortly after their release. And the abuse that COs faced often fell on their families as well.

Just short of 6,000 men were sentenced for resisting military authority. 

 

Legacy of the COs

After the war, some former COs went into politics and a few ended up in Parliament. Others struggled to find work and rebuild their lives. All continued to have acronym-haunted dreams.

21 thoughts on “Conscientious Objectors in World War I Britain”

  1. Interesting story. As someone who grew up in the U.S. and was of draft age (though fortunately undrafted) during the Vietnam war, I’ve only thought about CO’s as part of the protest against what were the more politically objectionable and more recent wars.

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    • I worked briefly with an anti-draft center in the Twin Cities and remember endless discussions about what constituted a conscientious objection as opposed to a political objection and how totally pacifist a pacifist had to be. But yes, those guys during World War I paved the way for our generation.

      If it’s okay to ask, how on earth did you manage not to get drafted?

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      • Initially I had a student deferment because I was a college student. Student deferments, unfair as they were, got eliminated and they created a lottery system based on your birthday. It was one of the eeriest nights of my life listening to the radio as they read off the numbers. I was #90. At that point the war was winding down and they never reached my number.

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  3. I had no relevant knowledge other than a very general acquaintance with the CO’s. I appreciate the insight into how this worked (when it did).
    In the American Civil War likely Union conscripts were able to pay for a substitute to go to war for them. This was not necessarily considered a disgraceful shirking of duty. But some of the substitutes created their own cottage industry as “bounty jumpers.” They took the fee, went off to war, deserted, resurfaced somewhere else and became someone else’s substitute. There is no limit to what can inspire creativity.

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    • I knew that people with money could pay for substitutes during the Civil War, and I remember being shocked by that in high school. I’m just a touch harder to shock these days, but I’d never heard of the bounty jumpers. No limit to what can inspire creativity indeed, and no system so well thought out that it can’t fall apart in practice.

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  4. >>what would you do if your sister was threatened with rape by some German soldier or something like that? <<

    As I recall, the obviously effete, unmilitary and homosexual Lytton Strachey is supposed to have replied, after some moments' thought, "I should endeavour to interpose my person."

    I believe that by WW2, official attitudes to "conchies" allowed more latitude, though wider society could be as disapproving as before. But I get the impression there were many more men in recognised "reserved occupations", so with accepted reasons not to be in uniform.

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    • I can imagine a humorless board trying to figure out what to do with Strachey’s answer. I’d guess he got the last word there.

      World War II surely narrowed the field of COs down to the purest of pure pacifists. I know there were some, at least in the US, but my best unsubstantiated guess is that it was a much smaller number, and I don’t know that they had the visibility that WWI’s did, or (not unrelated) faced the same hostility.

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  6. My grandfather was in the British Army in WWI (he was a Highlander). He ended up as a POW during the Battle of Passchendaele. He swore it was the only reason he survived the war. I’m not sure you needed to be a coward not to want to have been involved in that.

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  7. This stupid question about them drunk Russians trying to rape your girlfriend / sister – and you accidentially carry that MP – that same stupid question was presented in the 1980s to “Kriegsdienstverweigerer”.

    As far as I can recall prisoners of war one were treated well all round – at least in the West, I have no idea about the eastern front. Things may have been different there, but still not comparable to what happened during WWII to Eastern soldiers in German captivity.

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    • Yeah, there’s so much wrong with that question that I wouldn’t know where to start.

      On the eastern front, it’s easy to imagine that it was different. The government was falling apart. Everything was breaking down. I’m working from memory, but I’m reasonably sure food was in short supply. It’d be surprising if POWs were a priority.

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      • If you are interested in this topic (WorldWar One in the East) I can recommend this book by two Polish historians :
        BORODZIEJ, Wlodozomierz , GORNY, Maciej : The Forgotten War. I read the German edition (“Der vergessene Weltkrieg. Europas Osten 1912-1923”). Two volumes.
        WWI did not end 1917 in the East with that treaty of Brest. The work is astoundingly (as per what I read in critiques / “Rezensionen”) the first coherent overview by European authors (saturated with source material, they know their job !) – of course I do not now whether there is a comparable Anglo-Saxon standard – well, book. (Sorry I’m tired, and have not used “academic” language in a long time.)
        Additional, for what follows in history, Bloodlands by that British historian whose name I forgot. SNYDER ! I think these two titles explain a lot of what we see nowadays, or better, of all that broke up after 1989 and the implosion of the SU. Just remember the Yugoslaw atrocities of the nineties. The first time btw a United Europe became party of war.
        In a strange sense we find ourselves in a pre-1914 situation again. So much for folks who dare to say that history “ends” somehow, somewhere.

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        • The books sound good, the topic interests me, and I’m overwhelmed enough right now to know I’m not really going to follow up on then in the foreseeable future. I do see the parallel between what’s happening in Ukraine and 1914, or pre-1914, though. It scares the hell out of me.

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